From everything I’ve read on here and other grammar/vocab sites, 寒い is used for cold weather while 冷たい is used for cold objects. I thought maybe it was just tangible/intangible, but I’ve seen many places say if you are describing a cold-hearted person, you should still use 冷たい.
Could someone explain why a cold-hearted person could be 冷たい while also having a cold heart is 寒い? Thank you!
Completely uneducated guess, so don’t take it as fact, but maybe 寒い is describing the state of the heart, sort of like treating a mood like a weather condition? The behavior itself would be 冷たい, as would anything that persists in a 寒い condition, but it’s not that the heart itself is cold, more so the state of the heart is cold. Also, 心 is more ethereal that just “heart” I think. It can mean heart in certain contexts, but it also covers a broader scope of mentality, spirit etc. 心臓が冷たい would be like a literal, anatomical heart is cold to the touch, but 心が寒い might use 寒い since it’s more about the condition/result than a specific thing happening to be cold.
I appreciate the honestly about it being a guess. However, the way you described it makes enough since that, should no one else reply, I will be using that as my mental reasoning because it makes it clear enough to understand and not get confused. Thank you!
To second Glideus, it’s as simple as the fact that tsumetai means cold to touch while samui is a state of coldness that you feel. I would perceive it as kind of an external vs internal feeling. Something external to you gives off coldness (tsumetai) but if you (internally) feel cold, it’s samui.
Another person is external to you, so they come off as tsumetai. Your heart is (hopefully) part of you/describes your internal emotional state, so it would be samui.
Only related in the sense that it shows 寒い used in non-literal senses, but my wife says my humor is 寒い when I tell dad level jokes.
I did some reading on the use of 寒い in your example, and the information I found said that both can be used to describe a person but that the emphasis changes with the word.
冷たい心 = a heart that is cold.
The person’s character is cold.
The coldness comes from the heart itself.
心が寒い = the heart feels cold.
The focus is on the feeling or atmosphere.
It suggests loneliness, emptiness, despair, alienation, or emotional chill.
Yeah I don’t think that we especially need to get philosophical here. One means a-hole and one means sad
yeah but they asked why lol
Right but no one mentioned that the definitions refer to two totally different things. I think “cold hearted” and “cold to the touch” would be instantly intelligible as being connected in meaning, just as “sad” and “chilly weather” would. But first you have to say that they mean “cold hearted” and “sad” respectively.
It seemed implied that OP knew what they meant imo but I might be wrong
Well they say that sources are telling them that they should use 冷たい for a cold-hearted person, which is the source of their confusion. The answer to which is “心が寒い does not mean cold-hearted, it means sad”
The framing of their question showed that OP already understood which word should be used for cold-hearted, in the sense of what is meant in the English phrasing. However, since 心が寒い is also a thing, and 寒い also means cold, thus making the literal translation to also be cold-hearted, it seemed to me that understanding the actual difference and the reason for it is possibly the best way to understand the issue.
You can memorize that 2+2=4, but you could also understand why it’s 4.
In this case, you could memorize that 冷たい心 is a cold-hearted person and 心が寒い人 is a sad person but you can also understand why they mean different things. I’ve personally found that times like this, where the direct-English translation doesn’t always make it easy to understand, understanding why it means what it means makes it click for me way easier and I spend less time trying to brute-force individual meanings into memory.
Outside of simply furthering my proficiency in Japanese, I also find the reasoning to be fascinating, personally.
I think this is the most straightforward answer.
It can be useful to get an understanding of “Why?” for questions like this to get a better intuition of the language. However understanding “Why?” doesn’t mean you’ll be able to extrapolate the reasoning to make other similar phrases.
This is correct. I understood which I should use, I just didn’t understand the why. The comments in the thread have helped it make sense though!
Thank you! This plus the little details from the other commenters makes it make much more sense.
I got you, I got you. It just makes me reflect a bit though. Sorry if this is too much of a digression. These associations-between something that is cold to the touch and a lack of emotion, and between sadness and cold weather/winter in general-already exist in english and were even used in this thread to explain a supposedly alien semantic concept. I don’t think you guys are really wrong about what you’re saying, but we do kind of exist in a language-learning milieu that treats completely intelligible concepts as special complexities that illustrate the vastness of gulf between the lived experiences of native japanese speakers and native english speakers. It’s all over the place once you notice it.
It shows up right at the beginning, with the tenses. “Now get this. This will be hard for an english speaker to wrap their mind around,” they say. “But Japanese only has two tenses. How different they must view the world, with the present and the future existing within the same conceptual moment!” Meanwhile, English only has two tenses: past and non-past, the exact same ones that are used in Japanese. ( We don’t even use our pseudo future tense as often as we think, and we use it less the more certain we are of a future event. “I’ll come at 2” vs “I’m coming at 2” “the plane leaves at 2” etc.) But people act like they have to rethinkw their entire worldview to understand japanese tenses.
I guess I don’t see my explanation as just being rote memorization. The word used for ice means cold-hearted. The word used for the weather on a winter day means sad. We don’t need to learn the why because we already know it. we’ve felt the difference between those two things for our entire lives. Explanation is often helpful, but it’s something to be careful about. I’m not saying this was happening, it wasn’t, but these kinds of discussions so often turn into a kind of psycho-analysis of native speakers, with the unspoken premise being that the language is a result of particular cultural features. ‘The language is high-context because it’s a high context society, which is because it’s a collectivist society,’ is an idea you see constantly, but these two things do not follow as closely as people assume. The same researchers that classified Japan as a high-context society also classified the American South as one. You can’t really find out anything about a society by the features of their language.
I really hope I’m not coming off as dismissive or confrontational here, but I just think it’s worth talking about this stuff.